'THE STREET' A GRITTY NEWCOMER TO URBAN COP SHOW GENRE

Anyone who thought NBC's Hill Street Blues was the last original word on the subject of urban police shows should check out, if only for curiosity's sake, The Street, a syndicated series that premieres Monday.

The Street, which will air at 11 p.m. Monday through Friday on WDZL-Ch. 39, is a half-hour drama that chronicles the experiences of cops on the graveyard shift in Newark, N.J. Shot on videotape with a hand-held camera in a cinema- verite style, it is supposed to resemble a documentary.

The series has no recognizable stars, although Miami Vice addicts may recognize Stanley Tucci, who plays one of Sonny Crockett's perennial adversaries, as a cop celebrating his birthday in Monday's opener. Apart from Tucci, everyone in The Street is unknown, and is likely to remain so. The show is cast with an eye to verisimilitude, not potential star appeal.

One of The Street's co-producers is Robert Pittman, who is best-known as a co-creator of MTV. But this show and MTV have nothing in common. You won't find anything flashy or conventionally trendy in The Street. Its print ads state that it is "for adults only" and believe me, they don't exaggerate.

The ads also state that "you have NEVER seen anything like it," which also is true. You may not want to see The Street again, either, after sampling the first two episodes. But at least you'll have to give it points for being different.

The structure is simple: We follow a different pair of cops each night, as their patrol car prowls the battleground that is downtown Newark. Their run- ins with a motley assortment of hookers, pimps, thieves and murderers is balanced against their own banal conversations and encounters with the frightened, angry citizens.

It's worth noting that The Street is packed -- and I mean packed -- with profanity. Pittman has a reputation as a showman, and he undoubtedly knows the exploitation value of a series in which people talk dirty. But the fact is, The Street rarely seems to resort to profanity for mere shock value. The show looks and sounds right.

That's not to say it's a commanding achievement in all areas. The second installment, airing Tuesday, is better than the first -- but it opens with an unnecessary scene in which two patrolmen clean a suspect's vomit out of a squad car, and try to figure out what the man had for dinner.

Later, the episode redeems itself with a powerful scene in which a rookie cop tries to solicit sex from a woman he has stopped for running a traffic light.

The question I kept asking myself as I watched The Street was, "Who is the target audience for this show?" Its grim blend of gore, profanity and cynicism is hardly something that a viewer will want to see before retiring for the night.

KRISTOFFERSON MAKES WESTERN

Fans of John Ford's classic western, The Searchers ('56) -- the model for films as diverse as Star Wars ('77) and Hard Core ('79) -- won't find many surprises in The Tracker, the newest HBO Premiere Film. But they'll like it. It airs Saturday at noon and throughout April.

Kris Kristofferson follows in John Wayne's footsteps in this suspenseful western, playing Noble Adams, a veteran scout who is joined by his son Tom (Mark Moses) when psychotic outlaws kidnap a young girl. Scott Wilson plays "Red Jack" Stillwell, the leader of the outlaws.

The Tracker is a good movie, which makes it an astonishing achievement for HBO, most of whose made-for-cable films are dreadful. The acting is excellent, particularly by Kristofferson and Wilson, (who plays Stillwell as a religious fanatic) and the script provides a few levels of plot beneath the surface- level manhunt. John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) directed it capably on Colorado and New Mexico locations.